Today has been a historic day a day where finally workers hit back and ensured that work paid more than benefits. Listening to the phone in shows today the attitude of the working public is that the reforms dont go far enough and still encourage baby breeding coupled with the obligatory benefit claim. It is a start however.

As James Bartholomew pointed out today the epidemic of sick benefits are for musculoskeletal and mental health problems because people who claim to have them know a doctor cant prove or disprove them. How convenient so hence they are known as the 'benefit clincher' until now where they are being found out.

As was also pointed out today by several people the generous level of benefits means that the fraud rate is low. No other reason. Danny take note below

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16812185

If you can claim a cool £30k legally on benefits what need is there for fraud? Bear in mind this real family has no sickness so how can they get so much? The father hasnt worked for years blames others says his skills arent in need but wont retrain why?!

As you can see the system is so generous he can budget a night at the pub every week and Sky also. Is that what the benefits system is for? Why have kids when you dont have a job to provide for them? ££££ is the answer from mugs that work. That is why today breaks the mold. The mold where people can simply say I am sick no questions are asked and the bank vault opens and its help yourself time. Finally the door is closing.

rather than deriding the source just look at the factual content Danny. Looking at figures rather than rhetoric Danny if only 1/8 are truly sick to work then what have the other 7/8 been up to all these years? Acting up with the oh my back hurts, oh I'm too anxious to work, no kidding aint we all!

Danny and co. just cannot accept that people should always be better off in work than on welfare. That is what the reforms do, nothing more. Fact is people on phone ins today who work dont feel they go far enough. Naturally those who dont just cannot grasp the concept of working and looking after yourself.

Rather than complaining there is no jobs start doing the jobs migrant workers are doing. Until all those jobs are filled by Brits there will never be a reason to say there is no jobs. Danny still avoids this issue of worklessness masquerading as illness.

This is a historic day for the worker. The reforms dont go far enough but are a start. Public support for them naturally from those that contribute is unwavering.

The reforms are simple any job should pay more than welfare. Even with the reforms I still think benefits wins but the margin of generosity has been cut.

Before when a benefit person was offered a job the first thing they would do is they would magically develop all these maths skills all of a sudden and their brain would go into overdrive to see if it was worth more than the handout.

That should never be an issue now so their minds can be put at rest but then they dont have incentive to display their maths skills. Oh well!

No Danny no look in the mirror if you want to see someone that meets that description. Its people like you that want punitive tax regimes imposed that make working people suffer just so you can live a life of riley. Well today was the day that finally working people hit back after being flogged for decades by the demands of the benefit crowds.

You just dont get it. If high tax regimes are imposed people dont pay it. They move. Why should they? People work to support their own families not yours.

What have you against work paying more than welfare? Its people like you want fools to work all the hours possible then give all the income to you to enjoy. How fair is that? But today is the day that the worm finally turned, looked you straight in the face and said enough is enough. Working people have had enough of being plundered for everything they have and funding other peoples existence.

Listen any of the phone in(s) today you will find practically every called in support of the changes and asking more to the point why did it take so long to introduce?? Not one said there wasnt need for reform. Working people have had enough of 'baby breeders' and other freeloaders who think money is grown on trees and they just need to go there and pick it asap.

The current cries are 'what if they stop my money?' Hmm but if you aint worked or barely worked it aint your money is it?

All these cries of how will I survive? Well ever thought of getting a job? Alien concept I know but one that every person who ask how will I survive should ask themself. Dont say there aint any jobs. There are jobs in every local hotel/factory/care home near you. You may not find the work appealing but tough. In the past it didnt pay to work benefits were more lucrative. That should change now as of today. So now you get a choice of work or nothing? Then what you going to choose?

Seeing as though 7/8 of sickness benefits claimants have been shown to be shirkers according to latest figures they need to be also told to support themselves and not butcher other peoples pay packets for their upkeep.

Today is a historic day for the working man. Its all well for Liam Byrne to run around the TV stations like a monkey but dont forget he was the one that wrote 'sorry there is no money left' on leaving office. Quite ironic those words as they probably resulted in these reforms to a degree.

Final point should go to Joan who phoned in today to national radio. She said both me and my husband work full time, kids in school. We havent had a holiday for 3 years. Yet our neighbours who have never worked are in Tenerife this week and will likely to Florida later in the year. She said hopefully with these reforms it should be her family going on holiday and not her neighbours.

So Danny that is who the reforms look to reward. The working man. You fail to grasp that concept but given people have leeched off the system for decades today is a very rude but long overdue wake up call for them all.

@ Troll with no name: Your ignorance is unbelievable. You need life to teach you a lesson. I hope, oh dear God how I hope, that it will. Then I will talk to you human-to-human.

Go away. No one wants you. You bring shame to the very idea of civilised life. With attitudes like yours, long ago, your hunter-gatherer peers would have pointed at the horizon and told you to go. And if you didn't, they would have practised their stone-throwing skills on you.

Just go, you fascist fool.

(Oh, and if all the millionaire parasites left tomorrow, it wouldn't be soon enough.)

(Hasn't had a holiday for three years! I haven't had a holiday since 1977.)

The welfare state is a safety net. It is there to catch anyone who falls on hard times, including you. Say you got hit by a car and were tragically paralyzed from the waist down; the welfare state would pay you a Mobility Allowance so that you could still leave the house. It would pay for any special equipment you needed and a personal assistant to help you go to the loo, bathe and perform household chores. If you lost your job and were unable to find a new one, the state would support you until you were able to find another one. Sounds pretty fair now, doesn’t it?

2. What do you think the other options are?

Let’s be totally selfish here; the other option is that anyone without a significant safety net is made homeless. Two summers ago I worked out that if I took my family out of the picture, I was one month away from homelessness. Two if my landlord felt like being lenient with the rent. Would you seriously prefer that millions of people had to live on the streets (your streets) if it meant that you would have to pay a couple of pence less tax?As attractive as it is to bluster on about how we should kick everyone off benefits and into paid employment, the jobs situation now is rather like the time my local library gave me an extension on my library books because if I were to bring them all back at once, they would not have room on the shelves. There simply are not enough jobs and due to 'austerity measures', more and more jobs are being lost. The more impoverished the area, the worse the situation.Job hunting is a soul destroying process. I have been unemployed twice and both times I was spending around four hours a day, five or six days a week job hunting. I had an excellent CV, a whole bunch of qualifications and lots of voluntary work but the fact was that every entry level job on the system was attracting around 150 applications; jobs at places like MacDonalds and Tesco were attracting over 500. It really isn't that simple.

3. Seriously, the amount of tax you pay into the welfare state is a pittance.

Every time I ‘talk’ to people having a winge about their tax going to ‘scroungers’, they seem to have run away with the idea that they, personally are paying for that flatscreen TV they have heard so much about. Your tax goes to pay for many, many things including schools, hospitals, bin collections, roads, the legal system, the royal family, streetlights, the military and right now, for massive corporations like Tesco to get free labor when they should be actually employing people who need jobs. If you earn £20,000 a year, you pay 0.00003066 pence a year to each individual person on unemployment benefit. I don’t imagine you

4. If your objection is based around a perception that people on benefits are living a life of luxury, then I’m afraid I have news for you.

Being unemployed is not a crime. I know that must come as a shock to you, but I’m afraid it’s true. Every citizen has the right to the same freedoms, rights and basic standard of living, regardless of their personal situation. Your perception probably came from sensationalist newspaper headlines urging you to grab torch and pitchfork because the Daily Mail found one family who, if you add up and tweak all of the benefits they receive, seem to be receiving a pretty average wage! And the bastards spent it on some really normal things! Kill them!Words to look out for are ‘flatscreen’ (seriously, when was the last time you saw a TV that WASN’T flatscreen outside of a school science classroom?) ‘laptop’ (how many families do you know who don’t have a computer?) and any references to irrelevant lifestyle choices such as cigarettes, obesity or alcohol. And that large number emblazoned across the top of the page? Before jumping to conclusions, ask yourself some questions:· How many people is that split between? Often journalists will find a large family and add up every benefit they claim to make the number a lot bigger.· Where are they living? The amount of housing benefit paid to each family depends hugely on what part of the country they are living in and the size of house.· Is the article comparing like with like? I have seen many, many articles that compare an ‘average working wage’ for one week with a jobseekers payment which is paid fortnightly or the total yearly benefit payment for a whole family with the average monthly wage for a single earner. This is because the papers know that if they tell you that a jobseeker is typically expected to get by on around £50 a week, even in London, they don’t have a story.Just as the NHS has no right to refuse to treat your brain tumor because you enjoy a drink on the weekends, you have no right to dictate how benefit claimants spend their money. Benefit claimants are not being punished and if you think they should be, go away and have a good long think about why.

5. But I work for my money and I can barely make ends meet! Why should I pay for them to sit on their arses?’

This is one area where you may have a serious point-not about benefit claimants, I’m afraid you are probably still being a bit of a cock-but you are right about one thing. You absolutely should be earning the same if not more a year than someone claiming benefits. Why aren’t you? Because in most parts of the country, minimum wage does not equal living wage. Particularly in the current economic climate, the cost of living is rising much faster than the minimum wage. The independently calculated living wage would put most people at around £2000 a year better off; unfortunately, very few businesses pay it.THAT is something to get angry about. A popular rhetoric employed by Irritable Duncan Syndrome, one of my favouritest Tories in the whole wide world is that people are not taking or looking for certain jobs because they feel they are above them. He's in the right ballpark, but he came in from the wrong dugout.The reason people feel that many minimum wage jobs are beneath them is that they are hard work, dull, demoralising and generally unpleasant and then on top of that, you still have to go home and choose between putting the heating on and having three meals a day. If I could earn enough to comfortably pay my rent, utilities and food bills and put a little bit aside for emergencies I would happily clean toilets for eight hours a day.

I know I already said this, but it bears repeating. There are two prejudices here; firstly that the act of claiming benefits is in itself inherently criminal and secondly that people on benefits are inherently criminal. The first one is so ridiculous I’m not even going to bother; if you seriously believe this, you are so far gone as to be beyond saving.The second one is a bit more interesting. I read a story in The Express yesterday about a woman who had carried out a reign of terror against one of her neighbors; she was a thug and a bully and made this poor woman’s life hell. A sad story you’ll agree, but hardly something for the front page of a national newspaper. But there was one key fact that made this story particularly newsworthy and that was the fact that this woman was ON BENEFITS and the woman she was harassing was A VETERANS WIDOW.This was such a grossly transparent manipulation that it genuinely stopped me in my tracks. It very clearly highlighted the shorthand of prejudice; the headline may as well have read ‘SLYTHERIN WAS MEAN TO GRYFFINDOOR!’, the caricatures are so firmly entrenched in the political and journalistic canon.Politicians need you to think that these people are feckless and undeserving so they can get away with slashing the welfare state; Journalists need you to believe this so they can continue printing lazy, knee-jerk puff-pieces. Screw the lot of them over by remembering that all people are just people and a percentage of all people are dicks; I’d be more worried about what the rich and powerful dicks are doing.

7. Supporting the most vulnerable in society benefits everybody

Poverty isn’t good for anyone. (Apart from the economic elite, who needpeople willing to polish the parquet for a pittance). Impoverished people are less likely to invest culturally, socially or creatively in their community. Poverty affects the health, education and prospects of the people caught in its trap. It breeds resentment and apathy.It is crunch time; do you want a society where everybody is empowered to contribute, where people value their communities and incentives to commit crime and behave antisocially are greatly reduced? Or do you want to punish the poor, the disabled and the downright unlucky because, eewww poor people are so last century?

While millionaires get an average £100,000 tax cut this week Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) figures show that the average family will be £891 worse off this year because of tax and benefit changes since 2010.

And just looking at the new changes this week the poorest 10% are losing £127 while the richest 10% gain 10 times that - £1,265. Labour would not be making these deeply unfair choices this week.

The benefits bill is rising under this Government because our economy is flatlining, prices are rising faster than wages and unemployment is high.

And it is this Government's cuts to tax credits which have left thousands of working parents better off if they quit their job.

The best way to get the benefits bill down is to get our economy growing strongly and get people back to work.

Meanwhile, One-Rule-For-You-One-For-Us IDS reckons he can survive on £53 a week (as opposed to the £1600 a week he recieves).

The War between the Haves and Have-nots is hotting up.

The Tories are trying to pit the working against the sick and disabled but it's all of the Have-nots that should be standing up against these lying elitist pigs.

"Well today was the day that finally working people hit back after being flogged for decades by the demands of the benefit crowds."

No one told me there were public floggings? It's a bit unfair when crowds get to flog just one person! Unless it's a load of people (working? sweeping streets or summat?) being flogged by another load of people? And flogging them with "demands"! Crikey!

"But today is the day that the worm finally turned, looked you straight in the face and said enough is enough."

I prefered it when the worm was looking the other way!!

"they need to be also told to support themselves and not butcher other peoples pay packets for their upkeep."

Loads of out-of-work butchers! Lazy filleters!

"Its people like you want fools to work all the hours possible then give all the income to you to enjoy."

It's a shame there aren't any of these fools round where I live.

"Before when a benefit person was offered a job"

Benefit Person? Sounds like something out of Dr Who!

"Rather than complaining there is no jobs start doing the jobs migrant workers are doing"

That's going to be bit hard saying as migrant workers are doing them. Do we just walk up to them and ask if they'll move aside while we do their job? Will they mind? Will we have to share the pay?

"We havent had a holiday for 3 years. Yet our neighbours who have never worked are in Tenerife this week and will likely to Florida later in the year."

That's the bliddy Royal Family for you! Always off gallivanting around the world! Wish I lived next door to them though.

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About Me

I have a rare form of Crohn's Disease. I was diagnosed 21 years ago and have had many operations to remove strictures (narrowings in my bowel that grow like tumours) I suffer daily pain, often vomiting, malnourished and weak. I take mega-strong medications every day including chemo-style immuno-suppressants, opiates and anti-sickness injections. Sometimes I am fed into my central vein by tube, other times I can enjoy a nice meal out. I have children that I often can't look after and a husband who often looks after me.
Our lives are disrupted daily by the misery of a chronic condition.